diep wrote:
If you throw 100 million at a project in a science where everything is about testing, of course you always win.

Why would anyone or any government spend 100mln on a chess program?

There is a few valid excuses to give *some* funding, yet we must distinguish roles.

As you know from the wikileaks, USA has roughly 1200 intelligence agencies and 3 million people all together work there (the official numbers given there are different from 2.6 to 2.7 million to 3.0 million, by different congressional members so i hope you allow me to round it off at 3 million).

They doubled in size short after september 11, of course losing a lot of their personnel members there. Funding also more than doubled i assume.

Even the communistic party in Netherlands (called: SP = socialistic party, a direct marxistic party), they had in their 2007 election program an increase of 0.5 billion for the security forces, which is an incredible amount if you realize they are *against* having an army at all.

What do you do with all that cash?

First of all there is a number of valid 'see ya' guys who show up in tournaments. They have a good excuse to be there. Too much has happened there. Yet all they require is a few tickets and some hotel costs.

That's not the $100 million i refer to.

Vasik is excused there.

To give just 1 of the many examples excusing Vasik yet not the dudes who carried out the job of programming and wasting money to hardware:
It's not so long ago that Ahmad Altani left from USA back to Qatar, short before september 11. He was right under the nose of the USA, working at a military airbase. Really i didn't know that. It's the secrecy of the job that allows most dirt to happen. Had i known in 90s he worked at a military airbase, rather than the lame excuse he gave what sort of work he was doing, i would've immediately picked him out as someone who would've been a potential risk, as it was obvious to me he was a hardliner in religion.

Instead of that, he could use great hardware from others, Crafty and Diep and other software back in 90s ran on those Alpha's, cpu's not yet released, at the ICC server.

The evil part therefore is not the see ya guys who walk around; it is using that funding to build kick butt software, just because they can.

Instead of finding a method to do matrix calculations more accurately using a new algorithm that's lossless, i understand from conversations that currently a lot of problems in quantum mechanic get caused by round-off errors because of the floating point used, which let's the scientists use the slowish O ( n ^ 3 ) matrix calculations to solve the problem in that more accurate manner, they like to get more credits of course than that. So instead of helping their nation forwards, instead they join forces to fund an insane project like this.

Some guys like Fabien show a way to progress forwards and if someone else shows the fact it is possible, to just throw big hardware at it that eats on its own already dozens of millions in hardware, is of course something the non-brilliant working for the government can do as well.

The total amount of non-see ya guys that got funded is simply too big for this, as they did not do fundamental research. They only joined a contest, and were obviously paid to do so, as secret information and secret software was used to get things done.

What you then typically get is dozens of consultants from the health-IT and bioinformatics, so guys who really have no clue on computerchess, let alone game tree search, who join in, just to catch their rate of 75 euro an hour up to 168 euro an hour. Most are around 100 euro an hour.

Oh yeah, they need also a program to show up at a tournament. Ring ring, can i get a clone for myself? Of course they ring up everyone within government, but not the chessprogrammers. Some of them do ring up a few chessprogrammers. I also had a few on the line, but they definitely didn't want to give more than a 500 euro for a 'kick butt' clone. No business with me was done. Other chessprogrammers reported (i heard this from 3 different chessprogrammers) for very low fees. Around $30 to 30 euro an hour or so for a limited time usually.

So these crap people with their clones, who also pollute computerchess, show up *because* of the smoke already created by N*SA.

It has also very bad side effects.

As government even has to manipulate the tournament directors to not catch those guys as full blown clones, whereas even a kid on the street recognizes them as an actor and clueless.

If you obviously and willingly manipulate the entire field in such a manner that you are in 100% control over the field, all this with government funding, then that's what i call a very evil way to get things done.

For your information i have been in a tiny energy commission with respect to high voltage powerlines. Based upon knowledge i have from that i can assure you that when in 6 years from now USA must import the full 19 million barrels of oil daily into USA, which will have a cost by then of maybe even more than a trillion dollar a year, that in short term things will go very bad in USA. The military will be used for basically everything.

That's what happened in Greece also. Past 50 years, the national spendings to military were roughly 50% of the national income. A situation you cannot maintain. Total bankrupsy.

Yet despite that this energy problem is the biggest problem threatening USA in short term, if you would project the manipulation there onto a small world like computerchess, manipulation in computerchess by government has been a lot bigger.

Just because they could afford to do it.

100 million is peanuts for governments, if you realize how much money they waste anyway.

Last edited by diep on Sat Jan 29, 2011 11:19 pm, edited 3 times in total.

diep wrote:It took until 2007 the release of the strelka code, for me to realize, that the whole project was one giant NSA project about automatic tuning.

At least $100 milllion must have been put into it.

As for the software engineering, they just grabbed the above remarks i made. It's possibe just 1 programmer carried out the project and then they found someone from the see ya dudes with a chess title to walk around abroad.

[...]

Rybka is a classical form of NSA software engineering: do the minimum to get strong, and a maximum of usage of hardware at an unknown NSA location somewhere in the USA.

Your words are suggesting that you know exactly what happened. But I wonder whether you are presenting facts or a theory.

diep wrote:It took until 2007 the release of the strelka code, for me to realize, that the whole project was one giant NSA project about automatic tuning.

At least $100 milllion must have been put into it.

As for the software engineering, they just grabbed the above remarks i made. It's possibe just 1 programmer carried out the project and then they found someone from the see ya dudes with a chess title to walk around abroad.

[...]

Rybka is a classical form of NSA software engineering: do the minimum to get strong, and a maximum of usage of hardware at an unknown NSA location somewhere in the USA.

Your words are suggesting that you know exactly what happened. But I wonder whether you are presenting facts or a theory.

Would you mind telling more about your source of information?

Sven

I'm only posting information that was said by a bunch of programmers and i'm not even presenting most facts. Some of those programmers have been shut up by their governments now and no longer say a word on this, whereas they showed up with all kinds of information and evidence.

If you scroll back past few years in CCC, sometimes you will see also programmers post on this, yet in not such clear wordings.

It all obviously means that majority of the, especially European programmers, had zero clues on what was happening initially.

Please realize many programmers can read assembler very well.

What changed all that was the Russians.

here is my interpretation of what happened. Some Russian guys see Rybka, reverse engineer it with a tool (in fact you can commercially buy them if you have enough cash). They check out the code and are amazed by what they see.

What they see is something completely automatic tuned and to their calculations only top secret software can do this. It is of course very weird to see top secret softwares output in a public, in fact software that either is open source, freely available, or buyable on the internet.

So they throw it on the net under the name 'strelka'.

Realize this happens years after the funding happened.

When it is on the net, suddenly dozens of chessprogrammers, most of which didn't do effort to look too much into rybka yet, they can easily read this code as well.

When this happens a lot of chessprogrammers go start talk to me and what i presented above is just a very small bit of information. There is even more detailed opinions.

When all this occurs in 2007, China reports itself.

One by one then the authors get shut up by government in the years 2007-2008+.

Usually this happens when one of them gets hired to do a job.

Let me quote 1 programmer who said it loud and clear at an early stage, he later also got shut up.

"No i don't make a focking penny with computerchess directly, it's thrown away effort, but i have a chessprogram because of all the other sort of jobs i get hired for BECAUSE i have that strong chessprogram, the sneaky earnings outweigh any other income i have, so you bet i'll do effort to have a chessprogram".

Is that a very clear statement?

He was paid by a 'company' in Tel Aviv.

There is more recent statements there. It is always the same pattern. They see something, talk this around in a very careful manner, then suddenly they make cash with it and get shut up.

I'm not going to quote names, as then a cover up will occur, by that person himself, forced by his own government, provided that government is within NATO.

I'll give you another statement of someone. Again from a different nation, also within NATO.

"It is one big global conspiracy what happens right now in computerchess, it is all related to each other".

Some months later suddenly the same person gets shut up and has sincethen not said a word on this anymore and even claims that: "there is nothing wrong, nothing happened".

Here another quote from another person when he spoke to me, in this case also a programmer of a chess engine who is around already for a long time in computerchess, what he said about it was in a mystical way.

"Heh, you are very clever... ...they wanted to look like you"

He said this in another few wordings in later chats. In what i wrote i wrote down about mediocre guys, are also from this author, but i also tend to believe it plays a big role, which is why i wrote it down.

The easiest statements you get is always from people with a DIFFERENT nationality than you, living somewhere far away. I hope you realize that.

It's not a good idea to fish at university type guys, as they know nothing about all this. In terms of parameter tuning they live somewhere in the previous century, just pick a date there. 70s?

About the conspiracies happening, i think all together it's more than a couple of dozens of guys doing statements. You'll realize that historically seen i spoke with quite some guys.

diep wrote:It took until 2007 the release of the strelka code, for me to realize, that the whole project was one giant NSA project about automatic tuning.

At least $100 milllion must have been put into it.

As for the software engineering, they just grabbed the above remarks i made. It's possibe just 1 programmer carried out the project and then they found someone from the see ya dudes with a chess title to walk around abroad.

[...]

Rybka is a classical form of NSA software engineering: do the minimum to get strong, and a maximum of usage of hardware at an unknown NSA location somewhere in the USA.

Your words are suggesting that you know exactly what happened. But I wonder whether you are presenting facts or a theory.

Would you mind telling more about your source of information?

Sven

Now all quotes from end december 2005.

I'll give you another quote from Anthony Cozzie when i asked how it is possible that Rybka 1.0 looked a lot like how code looks like he programs.

"Maybe Vasik's brother stole my source code, as he's working at the same department like me".

Anthony couldn't read assembler code, yet i saw something very weird in Rybka 1.0 which i didn't understand. It seemed to me the evaluation function. I asked Anthony what it was.

If i may remind you Anthony ran world champs 2006 at a NCSA supercomputer.

Here is another quote from Anthony: "I emailed the secretary, on the returning email after the weekend, she gave me directly 100k cpunode hours system time to test a bit getting Zappa to work at the supercomputer".

Deductions you can do yourself now.

In Netherlands to get 80k cpunode hours for world champs 2003, i had to wait a full year, write tons of paper and hundreds of emails, and i was not allowed to test in fact. And Diep ran at a completely outdated supercomputer which had 500Mhz R14000 MIPS 'washing machine chip" processors at a time that everyone at world champs showed up with quad xeon MP 2.8Ghz. Chrilly with 8 x fpga.

The world champs 2003, the first day i had no internet, despite all sort of promises from the organisation. That definitely hurt me back then.

The first game i played there also was the first test of Diep at 512 processors.

To quote Stefan MK: "I know Diep and how slow it is, i'm amazed you get that much nps and that you don't crash".

I considered it a big compliment, but also felt like worlds biggest amateur there, to show up untested at a supercomputer.

Fritz escaped narrowly against Diep. That afternoon i managed to fix diep (after round 7). Then it worked a lot better last few rounds and played much better.

After the debacle, from my viewpoint that world champs, as i consider Diep at the supercomputer a failure from tournament viewpoint (see how little points it scored), Jaap van den Herik told me to write a managementreport when i complained about a few things such as no testing and desinformation from SGI regarding technical specifics of the machine, and the hard fact that my government had bought at the time a supercomputer which never had been tested at all. Also i could not explain a factor 12 difference in latency from the latency numbers i got from SGI and even single cpu, when diep did do without locking anything, just running at 1 cpu @ 400MB hashtable out of the 512 processors, it was 20% slower than when it ran at 1 cpu of the other partitions. I could not explain that 20%, except that they had bought something without testing. Maybe the processors in that partition didn't have the L2 run at full processor speed and the small partitions did?

About that managementreport. I didn't write it. Instead of writing another report ready to get dusted, i sought publicity and publicly published something. So basically publicly later on i got served off, but something within that organisation definitely changed. In 2007 and 2008 when i got a tour at the supercomputers (2 were installed in 2007 first a power5 and in 2007 it was replaced by the power8 that got ordered), i got nearly a private tour explaining how they had tested it and so on. Basically every single point of criticism mine they had implemented.

Of course i knew nothing from all that.

Please note i did not get paid a penny all those years for anything related to supercomputers and even today i'm unpaid there.

So all these guys are paid. Also i remember how HGM, a frequent poster here, told me how he wrote report after report on which programs to not allow and which to allow on the supercomputer, and how the commissions never read any of his report and just ignored it all.

Yet he got paid by yet another organisation to write those reports.

That's the difference with me, and to be honest i don't like to get not paid.

Anyway, you see how the real chessprogrammers struggle each time to get good testhardware, or any testing at all, and how the above guys with just 1 email get everything.

Which proves all my points and also this says more than enough about rybka & co.

Vincent

Last edited by diep on Sun Jan 30, 2011 12:10 am, edited 1 time in total.